Monthly Archives: March 2018

Enough Is Enough

Posted on 2018-03-31 by jcs

I’m not on Facebook. I’ve never been on Facebook. At first it was simply a matter of not being a 14 year old junior high schooler. Later, even adults started hanging out there but I still thought it was silly … Continue reading →

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A C++ Configuration for Emacs

Posted on 2018-03-30 by jcs

If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I don’t think very much of C++. It has all the disadvantages of C while managing to lose what makes C worthwhile. Others disagree, of course, and in any event … Continue reading →

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The Right Tool for the Job

Posted on 2018-03-29 by jcs

On the The Unix Heritage Society mailing list, someone started a thread commemorating the death of John Backus, who, in addition to inventing the Backus-Naur form, lead the team that developed the original FORTRAN. Someone else made a disparaging remark … Continue reading →

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Programmers and Hardware

Posted on 2018-03-28 by jcs

The other day I followed a reddit link to a blog post about forking on GitHub. I didn’t find the post that interesting but I did find one of the comments on reddit provocative. Chrisgseaton takes exception to the notion … Continue reading →

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Emacs Über Alles

Posted on 2018-03-27 by jcs

I’ve written before about EXWM and its use as a window manager for systems running on X Windows. The basic idea is that Emacs becomes your windows manager and other applications run in an Emacs buffer. That’s a boon for … Continue reading →

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Why C?

Posted on 2018-03-26 by jcs

Even though I mostly program in some form of Lisp these days, the majority of my programming over the years was in C. That’s not hard to understand: most of my work involved low level communications software such as radio … Continue reading →

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It Can Be Done

Posted on 2018-03-25 by jcs

The Dutch people have done a remarkable thing and as such serve as an inspiration to the rest of us. This week the voters rejected a bill that would have given the government sweeping powers to wire tap their citizens … Continue reading →

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A Reasonably Safe Windows Email Reading Environment

Posted on 2018-03-24 by jcs

If you are unfortunate enough to work in a Windows/Outlook/Exchange/MS Office/Adobe/Flash environment, you know that you are constantly at risk of being infected with email viruses. Needless to say, no system is completely secure but there are safer alternatives. Of … Continue reading →

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Calc For Programmers

Posted on 2018-03-23 by jcs

After writing about Florian Adamsky’s post on acronyms in AUCTeX, I snooped around on his site and came across a nice post on Emacs Calc from a programmer’s and computer scientist’s point of view. As regular readers know, I’ve been … Continue reading →

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New Release of Org Mode

Posted on 2018-03-22 by jcs

Bastien tweets that there’s a new Org mode release: #orgmode #emacs 9.1.8 is out, with important bugfixes for those using group tags (I know you are…) Enjoy! — Bastien Guerry (@bzg2) March 22, 2018 It’s already available in Org ELPA … Continue reading →

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